About This Piece

Vintage Design

Luar dining table designed by Ross Littell for ICF, Padova, Italy in 1972. The Luar dining table with the original stainless steel op art top has never been reissued. The word "luar" means moonlight in Portuguese and captures the mood and quality of the light reflected from the table's surface. The table's surface is made up of 50 brushed finish stainless steel tiles. The individual steel tiles vary in both the angle and depth of their brushed finish resulting in an interplay of light reflection and refraction creating an optical "shimmering" effect. This is the largest of the Luar series of tables.

Ross Littell was living in Italy in the early 1970s and here the influence of master Italian artist Getulio Alviani becomes visible. Alviani was best known for his "Vibrating Texture Surfaces" sculptures finished in steel and aluminum. As Argan wrote: "These works–in which the artist's operation induces particular effects of luminous reflection and refraction–are both works of art in the usual sense of the term and promoters of visual experience." The steel grid motif also clearly shows the influence of the American minimalists such as Carl Andre. Andre was famous for his sculptures made of ordinary industrial materials which are arranged directly on the floor in simple linear arrangements or grids. By reducing sculpture to its most basic elements and re-orientating it from the vertical to the horizontal plane, Andre helped to redefine the possibilities of sculpture for a whole generation of artists. Exploring his own fascination with geometry, nature, and motion, Littell experimented with making his own large-scale incised metal wall hangings that he called luminars, the table name "Luar" clearly also references the influence of these wall hangings on the design of this table.

Ross Littell (1924-2000) was an American textile designer, artist, and furniture designer. ''The New Furniture'' collection, with its combination of angularity and luxury in Belgian marble, shiny chrome, and woven white leather straps that he designed with William Katavolos and Douglas Kelley for the Laverne Company in 1952, is now considered an important collectible from the period. The sling-leather and chrome-frame T-Chair from that series is in the permanent design collection at the Museum of Modern Art in New York.
Ross Franklin Littell was born on July 14, 1924, in Los Angeles. After military service, he received a degree in Industrial Design from Pratt Institute in New York. In 1949, when he was 25, he won an award from the American Institute of Decorators for a low coffee table on tubular steel legs with a top made of birch dowls strung together inside a gumwood frame with handles.
Littell's work quickly attracted the attention of such prominent manufacturers as Knoll and Herman Miller, for whom he worked extensively in the 1950s and 1960s. In the 1960s he introduced the ‘graphic look’ into textiles by composing textile patterns, consisting of individual lines creating infinite geometrical figures. His patterns are also renowned for the way they combine light and shade to create the graphical-optical illusion of being three-dimensional. He moved to Copenhagen in 1960 and then to Italy, where he also worked on textile and furniture designs for prominent European manufacturers, among them Unika Vaev in Denmark and ICF DePadova in Italy. He also developed innovative fabric patterns based on the play of arithmetical combinations and a sense of rhythmic movement.
Littell continued to present new furniture and textile designs while expanding his interests to designing art, carpets, and tiles for corporate settings. Le Musee des Arts Decoratifs in Montreal included his textile work in the exhibition ''Design: What Modern Was, 1935-65'' in 1991 at the I.B.M. Gallery in New York.